Make Yes/No Checkbox Visible on Printed Report (1 Viewer)

[DeanFran]

I have a form with a Yes/No checkbox. Sometimes a data entry person will use this, sometimes an associated report is printed and a technician in the field will be required to fill check the box by hand and return the report for data entry. Makes sense right? Here's the problem, no matter what I have tried to format the check box, if the box isn't already checked, I can't get it to show up clearly on the printed report. It's set to Visible, width 6pt, solid, black, always display, yet it still is barely visible. Ive tried increasing the grid line thicknesses, making it shadowed, nothing seems to work. Is there anything I can do?

 

[vbaInet]

Have a look at the following link:

http://allenbrowne.com/ser-52.html

 

[DeanFran]

That is brilliant. I keep running across tutorials by Allen Browne, and he seems to come up with a work around for almost anything. Thank you very much. That said, why wouldn't MS make this a simple thing? Seems like my particular application requirement wouldn't be that rare in the real world. How does Access handle check boxes that they behave this way? Are they treated like an image?

 

[vbaInet]

It's probably just your printer. It shows fine on your screen and when you print to pdf right?
Another trick you can use is placing a label around the checkbox to act as a border. You can then change the border colour and border width of the label. But I guess there's no point of this when you have Wingdings.

 

[DeanFran]

The printer issue occurred to me, and I figured that by amping up the print quality I could get a better looking box, but that I couldn't expect everyone who might print one of these would know to do that. The check box looked fine on a monitor, and I never tried to print a pdf. I've already applied the fix, but when I get some time, I'm going to undo the fix, and see what a pdf looks like. Thanks again.

 

[vbaInet]

No problem! Let us know if printing to a pdf and then printing the pdf document makes a difference, it should.

 

[DeanFran]

Printing to pdf does make a difference, but check boxes still aren't as "black" as black text on the same page. Sort of that default gray that is so common with Access. I tried changing the Shape Outline, and a few other things, but none of those things appear to have any effect on this particular element.

 

[vbaInet]

Perhaps try a different laser jet printer and see if it makes a difference. By the way your printer settings isn't set to Draft is it?

 

[DeanFran]

Printer is set to "Normal" quality, whatever that means.

 

[vbaInet]

It seems fine on that front. Test it out on a different printer if you can. Otherwise, you can stick to the solution that works.